Elliot D. Menschik, MD, PhD

The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise initiative is intended to enable plug-and-play interoperability between clinical information systems from different vendors. Embraced by most major healthcare IT vendors, the IHE harnesses existing healthcare and IT standards such as DICOM and HL7 into integration profiles. The profiles amount to technical recipes for how standards must be implemented by vendors to ensure interoperability for specific tasks and problems faced by healthcare providers.

The ever increasing resolution and specificity of diagnostic imaging are certainly among the great success stories in the fight against cancer. However, whether used for screening, work-up, staging, or follow-up, imaging is at its best when radiologists have the benefit of comparing new images to historical priors, a practice well known to increase the accuracy of interpretation1,2 and one that represents the standard of care.3